SleepyEgg

The act of geotagging photos has come a long way since online photo services began reading EXIF data and sticking it on a map for location-based viewing. Concerns over the clash between tech and personal privacy—especially over the last year—have flourished in the media, forcing users to begin thinking more seriously about who can see what. Because of this shift, popular photo sharing service Flickr has made changes to its privacy settings—users can now specify who can see the geotags on specific photos based on where the photos were taken.

Previously, Flickr users were limited to turning geotags on or off for their photos, and separately limiting those photos to be visible to certain groups of contacts—two functions that happened to work together, but mostly functioned independently from each other. For example, a user might leave geotags off for most of her public photos, but upload certain photos from the club down the street with geotags on. But because she doesn’t want any creepers figuring out the exact address of where she spends most Saturday nights, she might limit those club photos so they’re only visible to friends. Such a solution is imperfect and can be quite tedious to employ; settings that should be changed might get overlooked, or geotags might show up on photos they shouldn’t.